At the beginning of June 2014, the U.S.A.'s National Endowment for
 the Arts (NEA) and the Cultural Value Project of the U.K.'s Arts 
Humanities Research Council (AHRC) convened a two-day symposium to bring
 together leading researchers and practitioners from both countries--as
well as from other parts of Europe, Australia, and Canada--to conduct a
"reality check" on the landscape of cultural participation metrics. The
goals of the event was to probe our assumptions about how and why we
measure public involvement in arts and culture, to confront any
orthodoxies in how cultural participation is reported, and to chart a
path toward more durable and meaningful measurement. The symposium
identified some pressing research questions and opportunities.

http://www.ahrc.ac.uk/Funded-Research/Funded-themes-and-programmes/Cultural-Value-Project/Pages/News-and-Events.aspx